Star Wars Imperial Assault

Overview

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas created the Star Wars franchise which led to a lot of tie-ins where people wanted to act out the events that took place in that universe. While the Star Wars RPGs and MMOs have been met with approval, Star Wars Imperial Assault offers a way for players to explore alternative storylines within the Star Wars Universe.

Star Wars Imperial Assault is a 2-5 player game that offers two modes of play: Skirmish Mode and Campaign Mode. In skirmish mode, one player picks the Rebel side and the other player picks the Imperial side and both create armies with a certain number of army points. Once that’s done, it’s a battle to complete one’s objectives before the other side does and whoever can do so first will win.

But most people aren’t going to play Star Wars Imperial Assault for the skirmish mode. If you’re like me and my group in any way, you’ll go ahead and play the Campaign mode. Here, 4 Rebel players pit themselves against a domineering Empire player and you all play through a set number of missions. The mission can range from killing a certain figure to disabling a certain group of objects on the map. But the cool thing is that you’re then able to carry over equipment, experience points, and money from mission to mission. In other words, it feels a lot like an RPG, where players will see progress in their character! Actually, that pretty much makes it an RPG!

Be warned though. Since this game is fairly expansive, it can be quite the money sink! They’ve been releasing expansion sets left and right, including the upcoming Star Wars Imperial Assault Bespin expansion that will feature the roguishly awesome Lando Calrissian!

Core Mechanics: Troop Deployment, Positioning, Movement

Victory Condition: For Skirmish Mode, you fulfill the conditions in the mission. In the campaign, it’s going to be roughly the same in that both Rebel and Empire groups will be given a set of mission instructions along with the win and loss objectives for each group partaking in the mission.

Ease of learning: There’s actually a lot of stuff to keep track of in this game. So much so that I wouldn’t say this game is easy to grasp 100% the first time through. With that said, the tutorial mission does an excellent job in easing you into the game and once you start playing and re-reading the rulebook a bunch of times to understand the flow of a round, the game becomes a series of steps that you cycle through until the round is over.